[acs-r] acs.R version 1.2: Now, with 2012 data

[arilamstein@gmail.com]

Hi Ezra,

Thanks for including this update.  I'm having a tough time figuring out
what data is available via acs.R.  From what you've said before, I gather
that it's "whatever is available via the Census API".  But that is also not
clear to me.  For example, I found this page on the census website, which I
think lists all ACS ever conducted:

http://factfinder2.census.gov/faces/help/jsf/pages/metadata.xhtml?lang=en&type=survey&id=survey.en.ACS_ACS

But when I tried to get the 2005 or 2007 ACS I get an error message and
lots of warnings.  Do you have any documentation of what data your package
supports retrieving?

I am interested in making animated gifs where each frame is a choropleth of
some demographic measurement at a particular year.  Right now that's
difficult because I'm just going hit or miss thru the list, and it seems to
be a lot of misses.

Also, in version 1.0 of choroplethr I am just using the 2011 (default) ACS.
 In subsequent versions I would like users to use whatever (year, span)
combinations acs.R supports.  I would also like to distribute a list of
available data with my code, but right now I don't have one.

Thanks.

Ari

On Wed, Jan 22, 2014 at 5:30 PM, Ezra Haber Glenn <eglenn at mit.edu> wrote:

>
> Dear acs.R folks:
>
> As some of you have noticed, the new five-year Census ACS data has
> just come out (see <http://www.census.gov/developers/data/>), and is
> now available via the Census API. To make sure you are able to fetch
> the freshest possible data to play with in R, I've updated the acs.R
> package to version 1.2, which now includes full support for the
> 2008-2012 ACS data.
>
> The latest version is now available on the CRAN repository -- see
> <http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/acs/index.html>. If you've
> already installed the package in the past, you can easily update with
> the update.packages() command; if you've never installed it, you can
> just as easily install it for the first time, by simply typing
> install.packages("acs"). In either case, be sure to load the library
> after installing by typing library(acs), and install (or re-install)
> an API key with api.key.install() -- see the documentation and the
> latest version of the acs user guide for more info.
>
> To get the latest data, just continue to use the acs.fetch() function
> as usual, but specify endyear=2012. (By default, endyear is set to
> 2011 if no year is explicitly passed to acs.fetch, and I didn't want
> to change this for fear of breaking existing user scripts. In the
> future, we might to rethink this, so that it selects the most recent
> endyear by default. Thoughts?)
>
> (Note: It might take a day or two for the updates to percolate through
> the CRAN system.  If you update and you're not sure which version you
> are using, you can always type packageVersion("acs") to find out.)
> --
> Ezra Haber Glenn, AICP
> Department of Urban Studies and Planning
> Massachusetts Institute of Technology
> 77 Massachusetts Ave., Room 7-337
> Cambridge, MA 02139
> eglenn at mit.edu
> http://dusp.mit.edu/faculty/ezra-glenn |
> http://eglenn.scripts.mit.edu/citystate/
> 617.253.2024 (w)
> 617.721.7131 (c)
>
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